This presentation, which is based on a recently written journal article with the same title, provides a theoretical analysis of the neoliberal production of anxiety in academic faculty members in universities in Northern Europe. The paper focuses on neoliberalization as it is instantiated through audit and ranking systems designed to produce academia as a space of economic efficiency and intensifying competition. We suggest that powerful forms of competition and ranking of academic performance have been developed in Northern Europe. These systems are differentiated and differentiating, and they serve to both index and facilitate the neoliberalization of the academy. Moreover, these audit and ranking systems produce an ongoing sense of anxiety among academic workers. We argue that neoliberalism in the academy is part of a wider system of anxiety production arising as part of the so-called ‘soft governance’ of everything, including life itself, in contemporary late liberalism.
About the authors:
Lawrence D. Berg is Professor of Critical Geography at the University of British Columbia, Canada, where he leads the Centre for Social, Spatial & Economic Justice.
Edward H. Huijbens is Professor at the University of Akureyri and researcher at the Institute for Tourism Research.
Henrik Gutzon Larsen is Associate Professor in Human Geography at Lund University, Sweden.
The presentation is organised by the Department of Geography and Tourism.